In the late 80's, caller identification (Caller ID) became a popular service provided to customers by numerous telecommunication companies. The standard Caller ID services provided a customer with an indicator of who was calling without requiring the customer to answer the call. In typical operations, the Caller ID services would retrieve information about the calling party from a database and then provide that information to the called party. The information was often provided in the form of a caller's telephone number and a name associated with that number.
On the flip side, however, calling parties had little information about the party they were placing a call to. In the early days of telephony, a caller typically knew the location of who they were calling based on the phone number used to reach them. For instance, when calling a home or office number the caller usually knew the location where these calls would be answered based on the dialed area code.
Today, with the proliferation of cellular and enterprise phone system features such as call forwarding and twinning, it has become nearly impossible to know the physical location of a called party for any given call. The called party's local time would also be very difficult to discover. A called party using a cellphone or enterprise phone system can be anywhere in the world without the caller knowing. This lack of awareness of where a called party is physically located means that they could be in a different time zone. Therefore the caller could be calling at a time that is inappropriate like after business hours or in the middle of the night. Furthermore, if the caller was made aware of the called party's location, the caller may chose not to place the call or select alternative methods in order to avoid the called party having to incur roaming or long distance charges.
To overcome these challenges, callers have used the called party's address via their business card to determine the called party's time zone. Callers would also learn to recognize certain area codes within numbers dialed in terms of the time zone they are in. This however, did not allow them to determine the location of a called party who is mobile. A need therefore exists for a system and method that provides called party awareness for overcoming the above-described limitations.